


Certainty

by mr-finch (soubriquet)



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Car Accidents, Cutting, M/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-20 02:24:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16547015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/pseuds/mr-finch
Summary: Bad Things Happen Bingo prompt: a scar to remember.David loses his family.





	Certainty

Doubt. What’s that like?

David only understands certainty. It’s the reality of every moment of his life, running beneath it all. It’s knowing that something is true, unequivocally.

David knows  it has only been two years since he came back to life. He knows that with the certainty reflecting at him in the glass spinning out of the window frames. He knows it in the blast of the airbags splitting his face in two. He knows it in the way everything feels like it turns upside down, then right way up, then upside down again. He knows it in the brief moment of spinning before the stop.

Everything’s quiet. That’s what he knows when he wakes again.

Everything’s quiet except the car, and the road, and the pain in his face singing, singing.

He blinks again and there’s a woman staring at him through the door. She’s opened it and she’s asking him questions but they make no sense. What date? What about the roof?

After a minute, she reaches out and closes her fingers over his hand. It’s the look in her eyes, beneath the tied-back blonde hair, that opens his ears and tells him what she hopes he doesn’t know. It's the focus on his side of the car from the firemen with the giant metal claw. It's the sirens and the sirens but the silence in the back.

“Try not to move your head,” she says, but he does. He turns to the driver's side and feels the world stop.

“Sarah-“ he says later, lying flat on a board that is being bumped and rolled along in little jerks of agony. “Where’s Sarah?”

His hand is squeezed and he squints, forcing his eyes downward since he can no longer move his head. “Sarah,” he says, but it’s not her. It’s that same paramedic. He blinks again.

The next thing he feels is pain. Twisting, tight as hell pain. It reminds him of being shot, as does the bed and the fluorescent lighting and the smell, but his chest doesn’t hurt enough.

It’s his arm that wants to, if it wasn’t currently numb. He remembers that feeling of the drug-induced fuzz that is now creeping along his forearm, his wrist, his elbow. He remembers the faint headache nudging the bridge of his nose and - he coughs - the ripple of twinges across his ribs. He’s in hospital. Somehow.

He turns his head to examine what he can see. The large cast on his arm says bone. The bandages on his chest say tissue damage. The gauze over his nose says broken. It could be worse. It could be worse.

He’s alone in the room for some time.

When a nurse comes in, he smiles at her. She’s wearing a Spongebob Squarepants watch and that takes him back to hours of Nickelodeon. “You got kids?” he asks her, as she sticks a cap on an ear thermometer.

She smiles back at him, before leaning in and putting the device into his ear. “One,” she says. “All grown up now.”

“Too old for Spongebob?” David sighs. “That’s a terrible age.”

The thermometer beeps and she withdraws it, checking the reading, before she disposes of the cap and jots the result down. She smiles back at him, picking up his wrist. “Twenty. Not old enough to behave like an adult, but not young enough to blame it on puberty.”

“Puberty’s in full swing in my house.” David tries to make a gesture with his free arm and immediately regrets it. “Thirteen and fifteen. Sometimes, I don’t know what’s going on with them anymore.”

The nurse nods and releases his wrist, writing down something else on his chart. She moves down the bed to his ankle, where a blood pressure balloon is slowly inflating and deflating.

“Growing up’s hard, I get it. I really do. I guess I never realised that watching your kids grow up would be even harder.”

The nurse writes down one more thing and then straightens up, hanging the chart back on the end of his bed. “You do what you can,” she says.

David nods. As she turns to go, he calls after her. “Hey, do you have my phone? I don’t know if anyone’s told my wife - Sarah - that I’m here?”

“The doctor will speak to you about that,” the nurse says, and slips out of the room.

A man, pushing seven feet tall, with overly round glasses and a colourful hint of ink poking out of his sleeves, identifies himself as David’s doctor. “You were in an accident,” he says, sitting down on a chair next to David’s bed.

The unimportant, replaceable things: that’s what David remembers. The three places where his arm and elbow fractured. The bruised sternum and the cracked ribs. The broken nose he discovered earlier. The blood pooling under his eyes, making it look like he was mugged.

It was a car accident, is what the doctor says.

Is there anyone else we can call, is what he says.

You had a concussion and so you may have some memory loss. What can you remember? he asks.

And David remembers.

 

*

 

It’s three weeks since the accident and his discharge back to the suburbs. Friends of Sarah, neighbours, people he didn’t know he had, have been pouring into the house ever since. They bring flowers and cards and food and leave it all for David to deal with. They bring their memories and their sympathy and their questions, and David has to sit there and listen to a thousand _I’m sorry_ s and _I can’t imagine how you’re feeling right now_ s.

He nods his head and says no, no you can’t, and he takes the food and never eats it, and he listens to them but he doesn’t really  _listen_ , and eventually the flood of visitors dries up.

The funerals are miserable. Three thirds of his life have been pummelled by a drunk driver and smashed into polished caskets lowered into the ground. Three halves of his whole have been rolled through a bright metal barrier and scattered onto mown grass. Three families have been reduced to a headstone and a blank space where the words he couldn’t bear to write are written.

It’s beyond doubt that he belongs with them. He’s certain of that. It’s a mistake - it’s some sick joke - to think that he should survive without them. It’s not a mistake he intends to leave alone for long.

He shuts the windows, closes the blinds. He turns off the television that has been running on static for the past twenty four hours. He clears out the fridge, taking out the last of the garbage and dumping it in the can. He goes through the house and picks out his favourite picture: the one they all took together, a couple of months after he got back home. The smiles and the happiness there is the place that he plans to go to.

In the bath, he starts with the cast. The straight razor he bought the day before works well at sawing through the plaster. It covers the porcelain in a fine white dust peppered with feathers of gauze. It sticks to his beard in tiny white spots.

When he has cut through it all the way down to his wrist, he prises it off. Underneath, wrapped in soft cotton, his arm is still swollen in places. He presses his finger to the worse spot and feels the swimming, empty feeling shoot through him where the bone hasn’t fully joined.

He peels the strips of tape off his nose, then shrugs off his shirt to look at his torso.

His chest is still mottled. Brown and yellow now, not purple, like a sepia landscape painting or an infection waiting to break out. He prods his ribs for tenderness and finds it. His arm begins to beg to be put back in the cast; he ignores it.

Doubt. What is that? Because it’s not the life he has now. This life is full of certainty.

He wipes the razor on his arm and turns on the water.

 

*

 

_ “David.” _

The light is too bright. The water is too loud. He turns his head and the room falls, rolling him over and over.

A hand on his shoulder halts the spin with a sickening jerk. 

_ “David.” _

He recognises that voice. Knows that man. It’s the one visitor he hasn’t had, despite knowing - knowing - that it’s the one visitor he wanted.

“Leave me,” David says, shrugging his shoulder.

He’s aware of a shadow sitting down. He’s aware of Frank - alive, so alive - kneeling beside the bathtub. Frank reaches over and turns off the water and David realises it’s been running over the sides for a long time.

“I’ve been watching,” Frank says, low and rusty.

“Yeah. Yeah?”

The water is hot. Hot as fire. Hot enough that David is cold and Frank’s hand is warm on his skin.

“David,” Frank says. “What’ve you- what’ve you done?”

David lifts his chin and finds Frank’s gaze. Frank’s staring into the water, staring at - oh, the blood. The red life pouring out of him. The broken cast floating oddly in the water.

He finds Frank again; fights through the wooziness. Frank looks so different now, so changed, and yet somehow not at all. David lifts his arm - the fucked one - out of the water and touches Frank’s cheek with his fingers, sliding them through his stubble.

He blinks and his eyes burn. “They died,” he breathes. “They all died."

“I know,” Frank says, his throat catching, and he takes David’s hand before it falls back into the water.

“David,” he says, “You’ve gotta come with me. You’ve gotta go to the hospital."

David tries to pull back, but Frank won’t let him. He leans into the touch instead, eyes fuzzy with tears. “I want to go.”

“You can’t,” Frank says. He shakes his head again and again, covering both their hands with his other one. “C’mon. You’re cold.”

He is cold. Even though the water is steaming, he’s shivering. David just looks at Frank for one long moment, pleading with him to relent. Pleading with him to leave. When he doesn’t, David exhales, dropping his chin to his chest.

He lets himself be taken out. His arm screams at every movement and his jeans drench everything they touch. Everything is tinged pink. Even his skin.

He lets Frank press gauze pads to his arms and wrap them in tight bandages. He lets him cover him in a towel, sitting loose-limbed and empty on the toilet seat while Frank dries his chest and rubs the flood from his hair.

He doesn’t know how to say anything. He doesn’t  _want_ to say anything. Most of all he wants to be back in the bath and bleeding, but he can’t move without Frank’s guidance anymore.

It takes him until he’s been pushed gently onto the bed for him to realise he hadn’t hesitated at the doorway; hadn’t refused to enter the room he and Sarah had shared for over a decade. It grips his stomach and wrenches it, pushing out a low, miserable howl.

“David.” Frank’s hands are on his shoulders and he’s facing him, tugging the towel further around his arms. “David. Stay with me."

His arms dangle in his lap and he doesn’t protest as Frank leans in and unbuttons his jeans in the most intimate touch he’s had since- since-

Frank drags the sodden fabric off him and his soaked boxers too, picking up another towel and looking at David.

He just sits there, useless. In a hollow place somewhere deep in his guts, a speck of shame flares up as he sees Frank accept his ineptitude and start to dry him off himself.

It’s when he’s almost done that the shivering starts in earnest.

Frank won’t stop looking at him; won’t stop covering him in towels; and David wants to tell him to stop, to go home, to leave him be and let him go see his family.

Instead, Frank hooks one hand under his legs and another behind his back and picks him up like he weighs nothing. He carries him around to the side of the bed and kicks the covers back, lowering David onto the sheets.

Even after three weeks, the pillow still smells like Sarah. It has the hint of her perfume and her makeup and the soft smell he associates with her hair when she falls asleep.

His eyes prick again and he presses his cheek against the pillow, feeling hot wet stripes run down from his eyes to the cotton cover.

He’s still shivering, even in the towels, but he doesn’t expect Frank to do yet more for him. He doesn’t anticipate the tentative hand on his arm, or the sinking of the bed, or the curve of a warm body behind him. He doesn’t know what to do with the kindness of Frank pulling him into his arms or the breeze of his breathing on his neck.

He never painted himself as the kind of man who would weep and break apart in the arms of the Punisher. He never thought he would have to.

It takes him until he stops shivering to realise that Frank is shaking too.

They’re both warm, after a fashion. Frank is a furnace under the comforter, and David can feel the difference in their bodies like he’s reading a map: taller there, ganglier there, broader there. It’s Frank’s hands, one pressed against his back and one curled completely around David’s stomach, that are shaking.

He exhales, closing his eyes.

“Frank,” he says, for the first time.

Frank doesn’t answer - maybe can’t - but David feels an acknowledgement in the tension of his body.

“Thank you,” he tells him, quietly. “For coming.”

The shaking intensifies for a moment. Then, slowly, it begins to fade away. Frank touches his forehead to the back of David’s skull and nudges his knee into the hollow at the back of David’s leg, as if he wants to mesh their skin together on every part of his body.

David sinks into him, welcoming the contact. It’s like steaming hot water enveloping him and yet it’s also just Frank Castle surrounding him. It’s like a car hurling him through the air and yet it’s also Frank holding him in place. It’s like words on a headstone he can’t bring himself to write and Frank never needing to say a thing.

It’s what he needs: it's doubt, knocking at the door of certainty.


End file.
